Lee Child

32nd annual Key West Literary Seminar

Lee Child was born in 1954 in Coventry, England, but spent his formative years in the nearby city of Birmingham. By coincidence he won a scholarship to the same high school that JRR Tolkien had attended. He went to law school in Sheffield, England, and after part-time work in the theater he joined Granada Television in Manchester for what turned out to be an eighteen-year career as a presentation director during British TV’s “golden age.” During his tenure his company made Brideshead Revisited, The Jewel in the Crown, Prime Suspect, and Cracker. But he was fired in 1995 at the age of forty as a result of corporate restructuring. Always a voracious reader, he decided to see an opportunity where others might have seen a crisis and bought six dollars’ worth of paper and pencils and sat down to write a book, Killing Floor, the first in the Jack Reacher series. The series is now eighteen books long, and the last nine have been #1 New York Times bestsellers. The series is published in nearly 100 countries and recently passed a billion dollars in gross sales.

Lee is the first British author ever elected president of Mystery Writers of America. Previous presidents included Raymond Chandler, John D. MacDonald, and Elmore Leonard. The only other European was Georges Simenon, the creator of Maigret. The UK Crime Writers Association recently gave Lee its Diamond Dagger, for lifetime achievement. Lee lives mostly in New York City, and occasionally in England and France. He is married with a grown-up daughter.